![]() ![]() Unlike Windows linux does not have any issues with shared library locking when installing packages. However often backports of more recent versions of R are available, and compiling R on linux is usually just a standard. The major package managers all have R available, though often the R versions in the official repositories are somewhat old. R on linux is generally a pretty nice experience, provided you are comfortable using the command line and debugging build systems. If you work with this type of data often I would strongly suggest looking into using R on linux or macOS instead. This makes dealing with non-english text on Windows a fraught experience. These issues are compounded by the fact that most of the R core developers and many packages authors do not use Windows as their primary OS, so users are often the first to see any encoding issues. It is much easier to unwittingly do the wrong thing than write code to handle the encodings correctly. If your happens to encounter any of these they will be converted to the U+XYZ format and you will lose the UTF-8 representation, with no real way to retrieve it.ģrd party R packages can also cause problems with encodings on Windows unless they are very careful.ĭealing with encodings as a package developer is very much a Pit of Dispair rather than a Pit of Success. Unfortunately there are many places internally where R will implicitly convert strings into the native encoding and back. R does support UTF-8 for strings on Windows, but these strings need to be explicitly marked as UTF-8.Ĭrucially this encoding needs to be maintained throughout all of your data manipulations with those strings. If you ever see this in your data this is the cause. In these cases where R cannot translate the data it will degrade it to characters that look like U+XYZ123. This means that you are dealing with data that is not in the same locale as your machine you will likely run into characters that R cannot convert to your native locale. On windows however the native encoding is not UTF-8, but instead is one of the many code pages chosen based on the particular locale set on your machine.Įach of these code pages can only encode a limited subset of unicode. On macOS and linux by default this native encoding is UTF-8, which can handle basically any of unicode’s 140,000+ characters without issue. Internally unicode strings in R have a ‘native’ encoding. The pak installer has some workarounds and will definitely have a more informative error message if this occurs. This issue is fundamental to the way Windows is designed, so there are limited things we can do to address it. This issue is compounded by the fact that install.packages() does not fail in these cases, it only issues a warning, so users do not always even realize something has gone wrong until they try to load the package. This restriction means that if you have an R package loaded and try to install a new version of that package, the DLL will be locked.īecause the DLL is locked the old version will not be removed and the new version cannot be copied, so users can end up with a package with new R code and an old DLL, which will break the next time they try to load the package.Īlso if you have multiple versions of R running at the same time this restriction still applies, so if you forgot you had a package loaded in one session and try to update to the latest version in another process your installation will be broken. This applies to all open files, but crucially in R’s case to the DLL files used by an R package with compiled code. Ultimately most of these issues are caused by DLL locking.ĭLLs (Dynamic-link libaries) are what R packages use to link compiled code to the R executable so the compiled code can be run by R.Īny file on Windows cannot be deleted if another process has a handle to it. ![]() Windows users report substantially increased numbers of package installation issues compared to other OSs. ![]()
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